


is it me?

by camomiletea



Category: Captain Marvel (2019)
Genre: A Barge of Garbage, Character Study, F/M, Gen, Light Sadism, Pining, Post-Reflections, Trash Ship, Unresolved Emotional Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Yon-Rogg just being a Sook, musings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-25
Updated: 2019-03-25
Packaged: 2019-12-07 08:57:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18232718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/camomiletea/pseuds/camomiletea
Summary: He hasn’t heard her knock in years now.He never will again.





	is it me?

**Author's Note:**

> Wow, getting back into writing for a problematic shipping was not how I thought I'd break my streak. Sorry in advance.

_Is it me?_  
  
It was like his body was running on an inner alarm, his brain waking and moving him out of sleep, like glitching clockwork.  
  
He would lie there for what felt like hours in a mere moment. He would lie, unsteady breath held in wait. In wait for that damned sound.  
  
Before, before it all fell apart, he would rise. He would rise in exasperation, in frustration and irritation, but undeniably amused nonetheless, as he had stretched. Then, before padding over towards the door of his small apartment, he would throw his robe over his shoulders in a show of modesty, ready to be greeted by that insufferable smirk.  
  
That _smirk._  
  
That ever present lilt of lips.  
  
The one that plainly stated that she had no guilty conscience in waking him.  
  
And what else was he to do but entertain her boredom?  
  
To keep her occupied from the dreams that may undo all his meticulous work, undoing his solid patience and most of all her cracking her loyalty.  
  
Though now he had realised just how deeply she had gotten under his skin.  
  
Just as much as he had tried to get under hers.  
  
All that work to maintain his hold over her, to control her emotional outbursts, to solidify her allegiance remained solely with the Kree.  
  
With him.  
  
Well they had definitely fucked that one up, hadn’t they?  
  
Still without fail, he woke.  
   
And so in these short moments after waking, his mind urging him out of sleep, he waits.  
  
Except _it’s_ not coming.  
  
It hasn’t in a long time.  
  
He hasn’t heard her knock in years.  
  
He never will again.  
  
And it's with that thought that he finally releases a breath he didn’t realise he had been holding. When a wave of something so painful courses through him, the motion of it so strong that had he not been laying down it would surely stagger him.  
  
He had tried so hard to deny it and yet it continues to leave him immobilised in wait.  
  
All because Yon-Rogg _misses_ her.  
  
He hates her.   
  
He hates her for making him feel like this, for undoing all of his work and progress. For all those years of putting up with her. For interrupting his sleep all those countless nights.  
  
And for the years gone now that her presence, or lack there off, should still make him feel so hollow?  
  
_Unforgivable._  
  
He tries to remember the time before her.  
  
Tries to remember when his sleep was unbothered, his time his own, his blood coursing through no other.   
  
Some nights he could quash the memory of her if he tried hard enough, could slip back into a restless sleep, recounting the days he was but an initiate in the wars fought by his people, the battles he fought when he was more boy than man.  
  
His bloodlust ran deep. He was good at what he did, and those thoughts alone could settle his waking mind more than most, more so than the tabs he took in an attempt to smother his errant thinking.  
  
Other nights he would find his thoughts circulating around the crux of his pain. Around the infernal ponderings that went along with it.  
  
And always, _always,_ that phantom smirk haunting him throughout.  
  
These nights he would not stay in his rooms for long, the small space only seeming to aggravate him further.   
  
Too many memories lay in the crevices of the compound, in the apartments for warriors of the Kree, for both heroes and champions. He would find other distractions outside of it, whether by fighting in the simulator, or else drinking his weight in Hala spirits in some shoddy bar.  
  
In the ones he never took _her_ to.  
  
In the ones where she wouldn’t spin off her ludicrous wonderings, beguiling him with her humorous, near insane musings, out of her mouth and into his ever listening ear.  
  
_“I used to find you amusing,”_ he had told her as she faced him down, her smirk infuriating him as it had done so many times before. The Tesseract glowed tauntingly between them.  
  
_“Let’s put an end to this.”  
_  
Well, again, that had not gone according to plan, had it?  
  
Who could have thought that he would actually prefer her teasing over her contempt?   
  
And for all that the Kree had done for her no less.    
  
But that was it, wasn’t it?  
  
He placed his glass gently back onto the bar, the heavy synth sounds of music helping to break through his reflections occasionally.  
  
The poisonous green liquid searing the back of his throat, loosening the tension he seemed to constantly hold nowadays and yet still, with the noxious liquid churning in his gut, the thoughts continued.  
  
She hadn’t appreciated it _at all_.  
  
Hadn’t appreciated the secret and denial of her true heritage, the control of her powers, or the limitations they presented her with. Limitations her character seemed to struggle with, even if they were the simplest of orders. Not if they were not to her own design.  
  
She was a fighter, Terran or not, she was raised differently. Her nature defied his own.  
  
Her impulses, while admonished both seemingly on Terra and on Hala, refused to be smothered. She was still too Terran no matter how much they had tried to wash it off of her, the stain ran deep.   
  
Feelings were considered on the planet, emotions ran high without stifling.  
  
How completely  _different_ from Kree.   
  
He had been taught from a young age what his destiny was, what was to be expected of him. He was already at disadvantage with his pink skin. Were it a royal blue he would have climbed ranks far above his highest station, his emotions in check and his impulses kept at bay.   
  
As it was, he no longer held that rank, not after his failures.  
  
Thanks to her.  
  
_Or was it thanks to his own actions?_  
  
A blue skinned barkeep filled his glass now, recognition of his previous jaunts to this particular bar noticeable in his dark eyes.  
  
“Can’t sleep?”  
  
Yon-Rogg shrugged blithely, downing the liquid once again in answer.  
  
The barkeep raised an eyebrow, “You know there are tabs for that.”  
  
“Yeah,” Yon-Rogg huffed back, his glass once again hitting the counter with a clink, he couldn’t help a small, sardonic smile stretch his lips, “but then I’d _be_ sleeping.”  
  
The Kree looked at him uncertainly before grumbling something about cutting him off and moving away to serve other patrons.  
  
Yon-Rogg smiled after him sadly, one finger circling his now empty glass.  
  
“You know what time it is?” he had sighed as she stood on the other side of his threshold.  
  
“Can’t sleep.”  
  
“There are tabs for that.”  
  
“Yeah,” she would answer, as though it was the punchline of their repetitive exchange, “but then I’d be sleeping.”  
  
More often than not she would ask him to fight.  
  
Other times she would ask for his company at some bar they frequented after small off world excursions, when they returned both bruised and tired.   
  
Fewer times he would find the warmth of her body next to his. When she once again attempted a sleep not soured by memories she could not make sense of.  
  
It wasn’t sexual.  
  
He could never allow it to be. Even the thought alone would be impulsive on his part.  
  
Still he consented to her presence in his bed as they fell into uneasy sleep, bodies tired and entwined.  
  
These moments were few, at her lowest and most vulnerable.  
  
When the idea of a spar or drinking her weight in lurid spirits were not enough, and only when her sleep was tested to the point of fatigue.  
  
He would offer her a tab to send her off with, only to find her stubborn and in need of something more than the drug to ease her distress.  
  
It must be a Terran thing, he had thought then, letting her body close to his, her blonde head resting on his shoulder.  
  
A population of needy inhabitants, emotionally compromised from the moment of birth. How they've survived as long as they have, he had no clue.  
  
“There is nothing more dangerous for a warrior than emotion,” he had told her time and time again. Enough so that he could see her frustration grow stronger every single time. “Humour is a distraction. Anger only serves the enemy.”  
  
And she would use her anger every single time, her hands sparking with repressed excitability.  
  
Well, he had been wrong hadn’t he?   
  
Her anger had served her well. Along with her feelings about his own manipulations and the Intelligence’s hand in it all.  
  
“We _made_ her,” it had said to him upon his return, when his head was bowed in defeat, his body aching and hunched in humiliation of his failure.   
  
“We made her one of us, we gave her the power to live longer, be stronger, to be superior. _We_ gave her life. Without us the Tesseract's power would have eaten into her weak, Terran body until she was nothing but a husk of shriveling skin. We _alone_ are her saviours.”  
  
He had bitten back words then. Wanted to lash out at how without the Supreme’s own intervention into the woman’s destiny she would have died the same day she arrived on Hala.  
  
He had _wanted_ her to die that day.  
  
Instead he had been directed to share his blood. Ordered to stay at her bed side until she woke. Told to tutor her and mould her into a perfect Kree warrior. To teach her to suppress her emotions.  
  
And somehow  she had gotten under his skin, and now all it did was  _burn._  
  
He had let her in as a way to control her.  
  
Comforted her so she would come to him were she ever plagued by her past. All so she would let _him_ soothe away her doubts and only him. Together.  
  
“She sent me back to warn you,” he had said staring up at her.  
  
No, not her.  
  
_Its_ face.  
  
The Supreme Intelligence spared him a look of utter disdain. It was not just him that day who had suffered humiliation after all.  
  
He was not privy to how it and her last interaction went, but by the way _she_ had managed to break free of the Supremes’ hold, he imagined it was as much a defeat as he had suffered back on C53.  
  
“Let me guess,” the Supreme drawled, speaking through her face as it had done for years now. Though it was never quite right in the way she would smile, the way she would humour and beat him bloody.  
  
Again, not _her_ , it.  
  
The Supreme had found it rather funny back then, not worrying when Yon-Rogg had entered the simulator that day, so long ago now, to find that his own simulated face had been replaced with hers.  
  
He really wished then that the Supreme had said something enlightening, rather than taunt him unforgivably for how soft he had become.  
  
On her.  
  
On Vers.  
  
Or was it Carol now?  
  
He supposed it didn’t really matter, it was unlikely their paths would cross again.  
   
“She is a force to be reckoned with,” he had said then, as a way to reason the change. “Perhaps my constant surveillance of her growth is being confused with admiration.”  
  
The Supreme had awarded him with a smirk reminiscent of her own, yet twisted in a way that differentiated the real Vers to this imitation of her.  
  
The Supreme was _not_ smirking when he returned from his venture on C53.  
  
Its face had been distorted in a fury not even the real Vers could express on her features. And the real Vers _had_ faced him with much of her displeasure.  
  
No, the Supreme had scrunched its face up almost to the point of being unrecognisable to the vision’s counterpart. He would say it was pure outrage.  
  
“Let me guess,” It had drawled as he bowed submissively before it. “She gave you a threat to take back home with you.”  
  
He had nodded in assent.  
  
“Tell me then, what does the betrayer have to say.”  
  
Vers had _dragged_ him through the dirt by his ankle.  
  
“I can’t go back empty handed,” he had pleaded, pathetically, he may add silently.  
  
Her lips had quirked at his tone.  
  
“You won’t be empty handed,” she had said, and for _just_ a moment, he thought she meant that she would be coming with him.   
  
That she would turn herself over for her treason against the Kree.   
  
Those thoughts were quashed as soon as they came.   
  
“I’m sending you with a message,” she told him. “Tell the Supreme Intelligence that I’m coming to end it. The war, _the lies_ , all of it.”  
  
And then she had sent him away.  
  
Sent him away to be beaten mercilessly, to be tormented in a cell for those first few months back.  
  
He could still feel the ache of broken bones in his hand when it was crushed by his jailor.   
  
He could still feel the electric pulses that ran through him when the Supreme Intelligence had not gotten its fill of his pain, and of the simulated beatings it would put him through.  
  
Those were the easiest punishments, he found, because he’d already lived through them.  
  
He could deal with them because it _looked_ like her.  
  
“I think there’s a term for this,” it had pondered aloud, letting him gain his breath after it had knocked him down quite cruelly.  She-  _it_ , had crouched before him, tilted his head up and sneered, again making the face he had known so well so alien to him.  
  
She had _never_ been cruel.  
  
He had grunted in question, blue blood dripping into his eyes as the Intelligence grabbed his chin harder, simulated nails biting crescents into his skin.  
  
“Why you still see her here, with me,” it answered, throwing his head back roughly, letting his skull hit the solid floor once again.  
  
He groaned, blinking the blood from his eyes and staring into the white expanse above him, the nothingness of the simulation.  
  
“I don’t know why.”  
  
“Something in you does, otherwise I would not appear to you like this.”  
  
“ _I don’t_ -,”  
  
“Stop talking.”  
  
He grew silent, his lips pursing together in humility and shut his eyes to let the Supreme continue.  
  
“You see I think the term for this kind of thing is quite primitive. Before Vers betrayed the Kree I was simply _enlightened_ by the fact that she became my new face for you. To think I even found it 'funny' that one of the most strictly, unimpulsive leaders in the fleet should, dare I say it, find a comradery in the Terran he once wished dead upon arrival. And then to find that comradery had turned into something far more complicated? _Fascinating_.”  
  
“Tell me,” Yon-Rogg had breathed out roughly.  
  
The Supreme hummed.  
  
“I think I want _you_ to tell me. You see, even after her insolence drove Ronan, of all the Kree, into some form of submission, my face _still_ remains the same for you. Even as I beat you with it, it doesn’t even flicker. I think that’s because you rather enjoy being beaten by her,” it continued, "I think you _like_ being hurt by me, or by her,” it conceded with a shrug, “You take it so beautifully you see. You never complain, you never fight back-,”  
  
“You’re the Supreme,” Yon-Rogg coughed out, looking back towards her towering figure. “What’s the point?”  
  
“I wonder if you would do the same, were I wearing a different guise?” she mused, shaking her head, “but that binary is far too strenuous to tamper with for a mere experiment. All we can do is wonder.”  
  
She canted her head in thought, fitting him with a disappointed, albeit amused look.  
  
“I guess overall what it all means is that your emotions have gotten the best of you. _I expected better.”  
_  
He had used those same words on her, in many forms.  
  
Always pointing out her mistakes, her incompetence.  
  
It hadn’t mattered though, no matter how many times he had beaten them into her, she always got back up.  
  
The first year back had been torment.   
  
He had been diminished to nothing but a soldier, sent out on errands a suckling Kree could complete.  
  
The Supreme Intelligence rarely called on him now, and he considered that a blessing. He didn’t want to see her, even if it was only some thinly veiled mimicry of her.  
  
Their last conversation, close to a year ago now, only revealed that the same vision appeared. The Supreme still wore golden blonde tresses, warm brown eyes and a deceptively strong physique.  
  
“Was it love?” He had asked then. “Did I love her?”  
  
The Supreme had frowned and sent him away. It had chosen not to call on him again after that.  
  
Still his own considerations weighed him down.  
  
He wasn’t familiar with such a base emotion.  
  
He’d never had use of it before.  
  
Unfortunately now, saying it allowed gave it the power to follow him through every memory.   
  
In the way she knocked on his door in the early hours of the day, seeking him and him alone in her time of need. In the way she smiled up at him freely, a tease in her tone as she made some inane comment on his mood, his character, his advice and his 'wisdoms'.  
  
She had wormed her way in.  
  
And he _missed_ her.  
  
He had never cared about anyone in his life, bar himself, before her.  
  
And he _had_ cared.  
  
He would have played it off in the past as part of the game he used to keep her docile, but it was there undeniably to him.  
  
He had _cared_.  
  
He just couldn’t deal with what that had meant. How could he? When those emotions were something he had never allowed himself, that he couldn’t allow himself.  
  
He had been compromised without knowing.  
  
She had made him care.   
  
She was his charge, his student, his…  
  
“You’re a good friend,” she had told him once, over a glass of acid yellow liquid, her eyes unfocused.  
  
He had looked at her, his own sly smile answering back, “Kree don’t _have_ friends.”  
  
“Huh,” she had said. “Then we must be _very_ odd Kree.”  
  
He had dropped it there with a shake of his head, had let the night unwind as he normally did, with her drinking herself to near unconsciousness and half carrying her back to the apartments.  
  
“I think I had friends before,” she had said on the precipice of sleep as he laid her down back into the solitary cot befitting of her station. “I think they would carry me home too.”  
  
“So you were a drunk in your past life too,” he would say, catching her sloppy fist. “How unsurprising.”  
  
“I wish I could remember.”  
  
He had placed her hand back down gently on the linen of her mattress.  
  
“Sometimes memories forgotten are often memories trying to protect us,” he replied quietly, not meeting her gaze. “I think it’s for the best that you don’t remember.”  
  
But by that point she was already asleep, the glow of energy crackling around her fists like small fireworks. He watched in silence for several moments before leaving her to have, what he hoped, was dreamless sleep.  
  
He wondered where it had started. In what moment had he decided, subconsciously, that she was the thing he admired most above anybody else, including himself.  
  
Was it in some conversation they had had?   
  
While they were sparring perhaps?

Or was it with one of her playful nudges, in a smile she had shared with him, a secret she had given him willingly?  
  
Perhaps it was all of it massed into one.  
  
And yet the image of her rising to her feet despite the odds, overtook him each time.  
  
She had come so far.  
  
And while he had not meant it then, as he had told her it condescendingly to soften his own failures, he _was_ forever proud to see her break free of her confines.   
  
To see her free herself from the confines he had helped shackle her with.  
  
Kree blood may run through her, but the bonds Yon-Rogg had been weighed down with as Kree had not.   
  
Fighting against what was expected of her, fighting for her own convictions every day that she spent on Hala.  
  
It must have been truly stifling to her impulsive nature.  
  
It had run far deeper than the blood she was given.  
  
_“I don’t have_ anything _to prove to you.”_  
  
And like that he was nothing to her.  
  
Perhaps he never had been.  
  
He wondered idly, as he went through his drills, whether she ever thought of him wherever she was now.  
  
Did she miss him like he so clearly did? Or was he just another bad memory to her?  
  
“Who do you see?” she had asked him on the train that fateful day just before setting out on their last mission together.  
  
He had set her up in meeting with the Supreme Intelligence for the first time. Hoping that the lesson of controlling her emotions would finally drive its way home, hoping that she could finally become the Kree Hero he knew she was capable of being.  
  
“It is a sacred thing that no Kree should divulge,” he had answered in a tone that brokered no argument.  
  
And then she had given him that smile.  
  
The one he knew meant to tease and taunt, the one he knew meant no harm, not knowingly to her at least.  
  
_“Is it me?”_


End file.
